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Zombiiiiieeees Aiiiiiiiiii

Another volume on the horror that keeps giving (accounts of capital and how bad it is – figure people gonna wake up and do owt? Not holding my breath given the fun kids were having knocking on the door for sugar yesterday. Still). Haymarket seems to have a decent list now that’d not all trotting out the same old. This is on my list:

There is also an extract:

In Capital Marx writes that, like zombies, living labour under capitalism becomes ‘subservient to and led by an alien will and an alien intelligence’. In tandem, the mass of machinery to which workers are subordinated in production assumes the form of an ‘animated monster’, a monstrosity endowed with a soul and intelligence of its own. Factories, machines, assembly-lines, computerised production systems all take on a life of their own, directing the movements of labour, controlling workers as if they were merely inorganic parts of a giant apparatus. As capital assumes the form of ‘a mechanical monster whose body fills whole factories’, workers become ‘conscious organs of the automaton’. This reference to workers as organs of capital, which we also find in other Marxian texts, returns us to the theme of corporeal fragmentation. Labouring for capital, protests Marx, workers become mere appendages of this ‘animated monster’, dismembered body-parts activated by the motions of the grotesque corpus of capital.